42 Facts About Kaneto Shindo

Kaneto Shindo was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film producer, and writer, who directed 48 films and wrote scripts for 238.

Kaneto Shindo's best known films as a director include Children of Hiroshima, The Naked Island, Onibaba, Kuroneko and A Last Note.

Kaneto Shindo continued working as a screenwriter, director, and author until close to his death at the age of 100.

Kaneto Shindo was born in 1912 in the Saeki District of Hiroshima Prefecture as the youngest of four children.

Kaneto Shindo's family were wealthy landowners, but his father went bankrupt and lost all his land after acting as a loan guarantor.

Kaneto Shindo's mother became an agricultural labourer and died during his early childhood.

In 1933, Kaneto Shindo, then living with his brother in Onomichi, was inspired by Sadao Yamanaka's film Bangaku No issho to want to start a career in films.

Kaneto Shindo saved money by working in a bicycle shop and in 1934, with a letter of introduction from his brother to a policeman in Kyoto, he set off for Kyoto.

Kaneto Shindo was one of eleven workers in the developing department, but only three of them actually worked, the others being members of the company baseball team.

Kaneto Shindo would take the scripts home to study them.

Kaneto Shindo's job involved drying 200-foot lengths of film on a roller three metres long and two metres high, and he learned the relationship between the pieces of film he was drying and the scripts he read.

The brother of the policeman who had helped Kaneto Shindo get the job in Shinko Kinema was one of them.

Kaneto Shindo asked Shindo to take his place, and Shindo got a job in Shinko Kinema's art department run by Hiroshi Mizutani.

Kaneto Shindo had a talent for sketching which he used in scouting locations, since cameras were less often used in those days.

Kaneto Shindo discovered that a lot of people wanted to become film directors, including Mizutani, and he decided that he might have a better chance of success as a screenwriter.

Kaneto Shindo wrote a lot of film scripts, which were severely criticized by his friends, but he persisted.

Kaneto Shindo submitted a script called Tsuchi o ushinatta hyakusho, about a farmer who loses his land due to the construction of a dam, to a film magazine and won a prize of 100 yen, four times his then monthly salary of 25 yen.

Kaneto Shindo submitted scripts to Mizoguchi, only for Mizoguchi to tell him that he "had no talent" for screenwriting, events dramatized years later in Shindo's debut film Story of a Beloved Wife.

Kaneto Shindo's first realised screenplay was for the film Nanshin josei in 1940.

Kaneto Shindo was asked to write a script by director Tomu Uchida, but the script was never filmed due to Uchida's untimely military conscription.

At the surrender of Japan, Kaneto Shindo exchanged his uniform for cigarettes and made his way back to the Shochiku film studio at Ofuna.

The studio was deserted, and Kaneto Shindo spent his time in the script department reading the surviving scripts.

Kaneto Shindo wrote scripts for almost all of the Shochiku directors except Yasujiro Ozu.

In 1951, Kaneto Shindo made his debut as a director with the autobiographical Story of a Beloved Wife, starring Nobuko Otowa in the role of his deceased common-law wife Takako Kuji.

Between 1953 and 1959 Kaneto Shindo continued to make political films that were social critiques of poverty and women's suffering in present-day Japan.

In 1959 Kaneto Shindo made Lucky Dragon No 5, the true story of a fishing crew irradiated by an atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

Kaneto Shindo made his first ever trip abroad to attend the Moscow film festival, and he was able to sell the film in sixty-one countries.

In 1968 Kaneto Shindo made Kuroneko, a horror period film reminiscent of Onibaba.

Kaneto Shindo made the comedy Strong Women, Weak Men in 1968.

From 1972 to 1981, Kaneto Shindo served as chair of the Writers Guild of Japan.

Kaneto Shindo's 1974 film My Way was a throwback to films of his early career and an exposure of the Japanese government's mistreatment of the country's migratory workers.

In 1975, Kaneto Shindo made Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director, a documentary about his mentor who had died in 1956.

That same year, Kaneto Shindo travelled to America to film a television documentary, Document 8.6, about the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Kaneto Shindo met Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane which dropped the bomb, but was not able to interview him on film.

In 1984 Kaneto Shindo made The Horizon, based on the life of his sister.

Kaneto Shindo spends time in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II and lives a life of difficulty and disappointment.

Kaneto Shindo died in December 1994, prior to the film's 1995 release.

In 2000, at the age of 88, Kaneto Shindo filmed By Player, a biography of actor and long-time associate Taiji Tonoyama, incorporating aspects of the history of Kaneto Shindo's film company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, and using footage of Otowa shot in 1994.

In 2010, Kaneto Shindo directed Postcard, a story of middle-aged men drafted for military service at the end of the second world war loosely based on Kaneto Shindo's own experiences.

Kaze Kaneto Shindo appears in the credits for Kaneto Shindo's later films credited as "Kantoku kenko kanri", "Management of director's health".

Kaneto Shindo requested that his ashes be scattered on the Sukune island in Mihara where The Naked Island was filmed, and where half of Nobuko Otowa's ashes were scattered.

Kaneto Shindo is credited as art director for Ningen, Onibaba, and Owl.